The introduction of toll-free telephone service, as well as other mass calling services in the public switched telephone network (PSTN) has revolutionized the way in which the telephone network is utilized and the way in which many business services are provided. It is now estimated that on a typical day, 30-40% of all long distance calls are toll-free telephone calls. Most toll-free telephone calls are made to call centers where call handling agents having appropriate skills deal with callers. Such call centers may provide product support, retail marketing, consumer information, or any number of other services required to efficiently conduct business. Many automated toll-free services are also provided, including retail sales, telephone banking, and the like.
A great deal of inventive ingenuity has been directed to automating and improving the efficiency of call center equipment, and to ensure that calls are rapidly and efficiently handled. For example, call center controllers (CCCs), such as Automatic Call Distributors (ACDs), receive calls, automatically discriminate the service required by the caller, and select a termination for the call. The call center controllers may distribute calls based on agent availability and skill set, as well as other factors. Consequently, the number of agents available to handle calls is reduced. As a result, however, calls must be parked at the call center controller during peak periods when no agent is available to respond to a particular call. Consequently, thousands of network minutes are consumed daily by calls completed to toll-free numbers where no resources are available to handle the call at the time of completion. Since such calls tie up network resources in an unproductive way that is expensive for the service subscriber and potentially blocks other calls which could be completed through the network using facilities occupied by inter-exchange circuits, it is desirable to have some mechanism for controlling the number of calls completed to selected network terminations so that unproductive call completions are minimized and network facilities are thereby made available for other call completions.
One method of exercising such control is proposed by Weber in U.S. Pat. No. 4,191,860, which issued on Mar. 4, 1980. Weber proposed that the busy/idle status for lines to toll-free call stations be stored at a network control point responsible for providing network routing information so that calls to the toll-free station could be blocked if all lines were busy. The busy/idle data was to be sent by common channel signaling messages (transaction capability application part messages) to the network control point. This solution, however, proved to be impractical and, to the best of Applicant's knowledge, was never implemented in the network.
Consequently, there exists a need for a method and apparatus for providing local call treatment discrimination for selected calls in a switched telephone network.